The artist first gained notice through the work he exhibited at the Bandung Contemporary Art Awards that illustrated the arrival of Islam in Java by “appropriating” a composition by German Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer.

In depicting Islam’s mid-14th century arrival in Java with the arrival of the Renaissance in Europe in the late 14th to early 15th centuries, Eddy uses Javanese script to combine the telling of the former in the Babad Jawa chronicle with images from Dürer’s The Men’s Bathhouse.

The visualization aims to juxtapose two events that occurred around the same period but thousands of leagues apart, and compares the arrival of Islam that liberated the Javanese people from ceremonial duties with the liberalism of the Renaissance’s memento mori, a reminder of human mortality.

Eddy has since created multiple pieces that denote similarities between events in Java and in the wider world through juxtaposition.

Born in 1975 in Jakarta and graduating from the Indonesian Arts Institute in 1996, Eddy has held 18 solo exhibitions and taken part in numerous group exhibitions since 2007. His art appears in the collections of museums and other public venues, as well as private homes.

In his most recent piece, Eddy refers to the biblical story of David and Goliath in noting that the Babad Jawi tells a similar story of Arjuna killing a giant during the Perang Kembang (Flower War). If David felled Goliath with a slingshot and then chopped off his head, Arjuna slays the giant with a kris during the Perang Kembang in the “Wayang Purwa” chapter of the Mahabharata.

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